My map tells the story of a bike trip I took with two friends almost two years ago. My map taxonomy is below.
Thanks to being a bit data-obsessed, I recorded (and uploaded to Strava) every mile of our 44 day trip on a Garmin bike computer, which turned out to be incredibly easy to drag and drop onto QGIS. This map will be most fully understood by myself and the two friends I did the trip with, but the audience is also family and friends who want to know about the trip. It might also be interesting to someone who is planning to do the route, but it would not be a very helpful navigation tool.
I really enjoyed the process of going back through my photos and strava posts and choosing what was important to try and represent on the map. I tried to capture every moment worth sharing/remembering in the map, so that I would have all the stories collected and visible in a cohesive visual. Despite not rendering or shading elevation, I wanted the elevation profile to be central to the story, because it was what we cared about most/looked at more while we were riding more than the actual map. This allowed me to have two spaces to put information, both on the path and the elevation line, which kept things less cluttered.
In order to frame the entirety of the route, my layout scale was 1:2,500,000 and was tilted about 4 degrees. I went with a Lambert Conformal Conic projection which gave me accurate directions and angles. This might not have been the best choice since there is distortion the more we move away from the standard parallels, but scale and distance are symmetrically distorted across the central meridian, which I thought was good seeing as my route runs North to South.
I definitely wanted the route to be clear and easy to see, along with the elevation profile as top of the visual hierarchy. Until the very end I had other major roads displayed as reference lines to give context to big urban areas like Denver. Although the stroke was very tiny and very light brown, when the map was viewed all together on a screen they were very visible and cluttered everything. No matter how light I made them, in order for the monitor to show them at all it was very distracting, so for the final draft I removed them completely. I will play around with printing it, and maybe for a print version I can keep the light road lines.
Along with just the route I wanted to have some text to add some more insights about the trip, or at least explain in a blurb of sorts. I decided not to make text boxes alongside the route, so I didn’t explain much inside the map and added a few paragraphs at the bottom outside of the map. How much and what I added was arbitrary and tricky to know if I put too much and that bottom section just looks like a block of text. I did my best with a grid to organize the text boxes and shapes, but it might look more like a block of text and less like an extension of the design. And I didn’t even have space to explain the ambulance icon near Rawlins!
I am happy with the final result and will now try and get it to look good in print. It was a good trip down memory lane that produced a product that will forever commemorate a special time.
